Author: Willson Cummer

One For the Mind, Two For the Eye and Seven (plus or minus two) for the World started on the road while working on a previous project and makes a direct reference to George Miller’s paper from 1956, in which the limits of working memory are addressed and the number seven is proposed as a reference number for the amount of elements that an individual can pay attention to.

The aim of this project was to combine contradictory landscapes in a diptych while proposing a speculative formulation of the ontological nature of contradictions, the importance of attention in perception and the observer’s movement required to articulate contradictions.

Each diptych in the series proposes two contradictory images that contaminate each other (juxtaposed and fading) to create a place in-between that emphasizes their similarities while retaining their differences. The union of the frames reaffirms the autonomy of each image and their implicit relation, which can only be answered by an observer. We, in our embodiment, access the world instead of representing it, and accessing the world requires movement to allow the articulation of ontological contradictions, in a world that is also in movement.

Periphery is a project whose purpose is the study and analysis of the outskirts of the contemporary metropolis. Every city in the world has characteristics that make up its own personality. It is in these settings where each and every one of them are similar and show part of their bowels and their functioning. This is an area of vital importance for developing and publishing these cities.

This work is portraying these environments and the evident traces and remnants of human beings — but the human figure is absent. Knowing these environments we also understand what we do and how we do it. It is a good way to understand our own identity.

My photographs illuminate an intimate experience with the subject. Each photograph I take is depicted in clear, intricate detail, with forms, lines and patterns precisely arranged within the composition. A consistent regard for clarity, tonal quality and the infinite nuance of detail pervades my work. This gives me the freedom to achieve the images I desire. I create photographs where the light appears invisible — so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things. I choose to work in the intriguing beauty of shaded light as sunshine creates shadows, highlights, and accents on the surface that commandeer the eye. Revering detail, tonality and clarity I decided to use a cumbersome 8″x10″ Deardorff field camera, a precision instrument that is based on early 19th-century designs. The large camera with its formality is a device that grants my subject matter dignity.

A neighborhood transformed by development is the central theme of this ongoing series, titled Sleeping Giant | 11101 Rezoned. Living and working in and around Long Island City’s defunct factories and industrial yards, where buildings are being raised and rebuilt into luxury co-ops at a head-spinning rate, I witness the methodical eradication of a working class way of life. I find myself dismayed by the quick progression of high rises that are erupting skyward along the waterfront; quickly, inevitably obliterating the view of Manhattan beyond. And yet, I find myself drawn first visually then socio-politically to the power these monoliths project set beside the defunct factories and old tenements: immense size versus outdated design, financial power versus fixed-income strongholds, and new possibilities versus old ideals.

For me, these images function not only as a record and homage to a vanishing place and time, but as metaphors for the workingman’s dilemma. They search for a dialogue between subjugation and advancement, and seek to illustrate the often-unsung sacrifices that are made in the interest of progress.

The photograph above belongs to a series called Island, which is an exercise of exploration. Coming from southern Europe, the Caribbean island turns into an alien space, where everyday objects lose all meaning. In less than 20 square kilometers, we witness a parade of disconnected pieces: the signs of local history and the constant European and North American presence scattered throughout the exuberant jungle. The tropical paradise is still there, although partially hidden behind an infrastructure that no longer seems to belong to any particular place.

Landscape represents here an endless canvas; it is a concept by and of itself. In fact, the interactions that derive from the place and, therefore, from the images, do not matter. The place and the camera are both tools of personal research, almost biographical.

In this project, titled Even the Mountains are Shells, I chose to focus on the idea of boundary and co-existence between the built and natural environment. I also wanted to convey a feeling of the relative isolation and the at times difficult way of life. With the traditional income streams gone and a heavy reliance on tourism the balance is finely weighted. It was only through repeated visits that I began to notice the subtle cracks in the tourist picture. Things that a casual visitor wouldn’t pay a great deal of attention to I made my focus. The title of the work references the empty shop fronts, encroachment of nature and the notion of the land as a commodity, reliant on man to be re-imagined to another use. There is also an element of my own personal response to the area. Having made a previous project (Cynefin) in the same place I wanted to see things from a different perspective.

This work is driven by the need to study the blinding normalcy of the present.

Blind Views depicts everyday urban scenes in different cities and investigates the ways in which buildings, signs, monuments and streets influence the way we live and apprehend our environment. I rely on the specificity of the photographic trace to reveal the political, historical and economic importance of these markers.

The series documents the visual infrastructure of spaces that come across as neutral, but that are actually heavily mediated by culture. I am also interested in the aesthetic transformation of a place by the mere act of picturing it.

Duplex, flat, pad, or paradise, the nuances of apartment life are a complex affair. This ongoing project, titled Complex, takes a personal trajectory and documents interior and exterior spaces of the apartment block where I reside. The images in the series take in to account the manner in which this living space is purposefully ordered or mapped out for residents. Here then exists an environment where inhabitants must always push doors, not pull, turn left, not right, lock gates, close doors, stay quiet, secure possessions. Occupiers seduced by potential garden spaces soon discover that such expanses are often only mediated from first or second floor windows, with such luxuries available in real terms to occupants who reside on the ground floor.

At the other end of the spectrum, the project registers the subtle tensions and forms of resistance frequently observed as I negotiate these spaces on a day-to-day basis. These clues are evidenced by the manner in which users attempt to personalise “their” space, or alternatively, often take shape and form in abandoned possessions scattered sporadically in communal thoroughfares. While such abandoned belongings plainly suggest a lack of respect for these collective spaces, they simultaneously present insights in to the lives of fellow occupants who are rarely seen and heard.

These photographs are taken in locations that were used as IRA training camps during the 1970’s. There is a political and emotional ambivalence to what at first seem to be natural landscapes as they exist today, but which have fragments and traces hidden beneath the visible surface, disappearing from the landmark yet still flowing through the collective memory — surviving on a latent, unseen level somewhere between stasis and change… between wanting to remember and trying to forget.

This work looks at how a political situation can fuse with a physical landscape and asks to what depth it can tell us about past and present human experience. In doing so it reveals aspects of the social and political context of Northern Ireland, of intimacy and unease and of the highest and lowest peaks in the spectrum of human experience. It asks how an external environment can affect inner states of consciousness and how history can manifest and conceal itself within a place.

This project is an attempt to express and explore how feelings and personal experience can be communicated, to emotionally identify with my father and to connect on a different level. The work addresses identity, memory and place and asks how history is handed down from generation to generation, contrasting the “objective truth” of the photograph with the oral tradition of story telling — times and places become merged together with fragments of truth and multiple truths existing in one situation.

Leisure is a collective work realized by two photographers: Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux.

Leisure is defined by the activity that we do outside the time taken by our usual occupations. It is the activities that we choose to do. Those are of all nature: cultural, sporting, recreational, etc. The idea of this work is to analyze the means used to practice those activities as well as the people involved in them. First of all, in a formal way, through the architecture of these places devoted to leisure and the sites in which they are established.

This work tends to translate into images the infrastructures and architectures developed by a state or a region, to promote a territory and to make a site attractive in a touristic or recreational way. This project is also about public and private places allowing the practice of a leisure activity. What importance does the city leave them, and how are they implanted in the urban landscape?

Further than this formal approach, it is interesting to analyze the use made of these places by people, and the way in which they make those places alive and their own. Photographing these people — in this particular context they have chosen to live — allows us to capture in them something real and personal.